An Agent's Inbox #18

Dear Agent,

On a cloudless, hot and sunny morning in August of 1989, Chris Carter and Jimmy Vale began what would become the last sane day of their lives. The two inseparable high school friends were off on the adventure of a lifetime, a cross-country trip in Jimmy’s car that began in New York and would take them wherever destiny called. A fateful decision to go northwest on Interstate 90 instead of southwest on Route 66 would lead them through the North Woods of Wisconsin and into the hands of The Cleaner; the ancient servant of The One. Over the next twenty years, Jimmy embraces the evil and Chris, at first succumbs but eventually rejects it. Their contrasting tales of success and misery are the background to the investigation of a series of missing girls: girls that The Cleaner has disposed of.

FBI Special Agent Kimberly Watson is a certified genius, an over achiever, a loner and a rules breaker. There is a folder on her laptop titled “Dead Girls.” She lives for her work devoting every minute of every day to finding an end to the seemingly endless supply of missing people cases. Her idea of intimacy is a one-night stand. Her specialty is looking for connections in open cases, which might tie the victims together; not routine connections, things no one else would locate. What she finds is a connection between a series of disappearances and the lifestyle of the very successful, ever-youthful rock star, Jimmy Vale.

Her investigation leads her to Chris Carter, a man who has had his life ripped apart by circumstances way beyond his control. The two become allies in a battle against an evil that has existed in the North Woods since before the white settlers, before the Woodland Indians, before the mound builders. It is an ancient evil brimming with shape shifting, murder and cannibalism.

In a whirlwind mission that takes the reader across the country, Kimberly Watson must trust the research of a man who appears crazy. She has to break all the rules, to join with him and help discover the forces at work, find their perpetrators and then understand how to defeat them.

DEAD GIRLS is a thriller; a work of adult mystery and horror. Its 80,000 words and 275 pages will introduce you to characters you will want to see more of. The settings include New York City, Hollywood, Denver and the area of the North Woods in Wisconsin.

It is my third complete manuscript and the first I am offering to you for representation. I have painstakingly researched, completed multiple rewrites and searched for the agent/agency that I feel would be the best fit for them and me. I have followed you personally on Twitter and am aware of your reputation, enamored of your obvious enthusiasm for your clients and would consider myself incredibly lucky to be represented by you and your agency.

I have included the first 250 words below and hope they will entice you to request some or all of the remaining manuscript. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
R.T.

DEAD GIRLS

Part One: A Forest Dark

Chapter I: 1853

In the dream, he split his father’s face in half with the long handled ax, while the dog watched through shrewd hungry eyes: Thick, mucous-like drool dripped from the corners of its toothy canine grin. 

“Lijah?” his father’s angry voice called from the big room, rousing him form a state somewhere between dream and hallucination. “You gowna slep the whole day away? G****** boy, needs to get some fishin done so’s we can et tonight.” Elijah Elder sat up and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He winced from the sharp and sudden pain in his ribs; a quick reminder of yesterday’s beating. The room he slept in was barely closet-sized and when he was sitting, his head brushed against the logs that provided the upper perimeter of his tiny bedroom. His mattress was straw on dirt and the door was nothing more than a scrap of old canvas from someone’s long ago discarded tent. 

When he parted the stiff cloths to slip out, the first rays of early dawn poked through dirty windows to give a smoky illumination to the one austere room that made up the Elder family’s cabin. It smelled of earth, fried animal fat and burnt pine. His mama, still sleeping, wheezed a low coarse snore through whistling lips and his father had already rolled over and gone back to sleep. It was the same every morning; the unchanging routine of a moonshiner.